Hollywood Irony: Today’s Facebook Crash Is Alluded To In ‘The Social Network’

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REUTERS/Robert Galbraith

Facebook, for a time, crashed Thursday. Commerce, as we knew it, ground to a halt. Children cried. Workers were forced to, you know, work. Meanwhile NewsFeed spent this morning watching the Facebook movie – where all this was foretold.

Okay, not quite.

There is a scene in The Social Network in which Jesse Eisenberg, playing a young Mark Zuckerberg, has a near meltdown. He is in California, on the phone with a key funder in New York who has just clamped down on the cash. Zuckerberg knows that if the money slows down, if those servers and their connections go out, it will mean the end of the dream. (More on Facebook: Photos from inside the Facebook headquarters)

The fictional argument goes something like this: Facebook never goes down. It’s always there – always reliable. While other similar sites flake and occasionally blink out, Facebook remains solid. And the big-screen Zuckerberg knows well that, if Facebook goes down for an entire day, they might as well write off the whole thing; students will find their way to something else.

Now flash foward. As any regular Facebook user knows, the site has been a reliable platform for years. As far as NewsFeed is concerned, it certainly seems far more stable than, say, Twitter, which sputters regularly. But now Facebook has gone down today, repeatedly, just in advance of the Facebook film – on the same day that most of the world learned about Zuckerberg’s $100 million donation to Newark’s public schools. (Fashion on Facebook: The 10 most popular fashion houses)

No word yet on Zuckerberg’s reaction to Thursday’s outages, but here’s betting that the big-screen Jesse Eisenberg Zuckerberg would have a few choice word for whoever’s running the show today.

Life imitates art – to the chagrin of anyone with Farmville crops to water.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lB95KLmpLR4]